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1 70 OCEANOGRAPHY IN THE NEXT DECADE 



The costs of the latest equipment (e.g., ships, satellites, and 

 laboratory instrumentation) used in oceanography today are rising 

 much faster than the rate of inflation. This trend, seen in many 

 scientific fields, is what D. Allan Bromley, the President's Science 

 Advisor, calls the sophistication factor. For example, all major 

 oceanographic research vessels in the 1970s were equipped with 

 wide-beam echo sounders to measure the water depth beneath the 

 ship. These simple systems cost a few thousand dollars to install 

 and were inexpensive to operate. In the 1980s, the first multiple 

 narrow-beam echo sounders were introduced. These systems pro- 

 duced more accurate seafloor maps up to 16 times faster than the 

 older echo sounders, but they cost nearly $1 million per ship to 

 install and are much more costly to operate and maintain. In the 

 early 1990s, the second-generation multibeam swath mapping systems 

 were introduced. They are up to 10 times faster than the first 

 multibeam systems but cost nearly 2.5 times as much. This ex- 

 ample is not atypical; each oceanography discipline could cite 

 similar examples. As our capability to do oceanographic research 

 has increased over the past 20 years, the associated costs of ac- 

 quiring, operating, and maintaining modern facilities and equip- 

 ment have outpaced inflation. 



